


Drowned General

by venndaai



Series: MoE Roleswap Au [2]
Category: Machineries of Empire Series - Yoon Ha Lee
Genre: Alternate Universe - Role Reversal, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-11
Updated: 2018-07-02
Packaged: 2019-05-21 04:36:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14908451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/venndaai/pseuds/venndaai
Summary: To win an impossible war Commander Shuos Jedao must awaken an ancient weapon and an honored legendary general.





	1. Chapter 1

 

“A Shuos?” Cheris said. Voice flat, as usual; she’d figured out centuries ago that she was no good at obfuscating her emotions, and had opted to hide all trace of them whenever she talked to Kujen about anything other than numbers. It got on Kujen’s nerves, and he would have told her not to bother, since it wasn’t like he couldn’t see her entire personality matrix laid out in signifiers and code whenever he cared to, but he figured she was entitled to some quirks, and if it made her feel better, he could tolerate the annoyance. “Really?”

“If you’ll actually read the report, you’ll see he’s been seconded to the Kel for half a decade,” Kujen said. Mahar was doodling on the table, to all appearances not listening. “The hawks seem to have accepted him as one of their own, and it seems he’s humorless enough for it. What’s relevant is that the Shuos Hexarch recommended him. She says he’s some kind of tactical prodigy. Never lost a battle, apparently.”

A pause, presumably for Cheris to skim through the document. “And you’re sure this isn’t about his pretty face.”

Kujen laughed. “My dear Cheris, if that was the reason for my interest in him I’d hardly give him to you. I do have other ways of getting my hands on Istradez’s toys.”

“But you are interested,” and despite the flatness, he thought he could hear a note of satisfaction.

“He has a perfect battle record.  Not even you can claim as much. Who wouldn’t be intrigued?” Kujen slipped into Mahar just long enough to flip to a relevant page in the report. “And look, he’s a master duelist! You’ll have lots to talk about!”

Success: Cheris actually let out a quiet growl. The dueling was still a sore spot, then.

“Sometimes,” Kujen said, “you’re almost more trouble than you’re worth. Shuos-zho picked this fox as a gift for you. Take him, go get our nexus fortress back, make everyone happy, and then we can get back to tackling that phantom terrain problem.”

He looked at her readouts, and would have sighed, if a revenant had any use for breath. Primary signifier Ashhawk Unsheathed, as always, and beneath it, the Ashhawk Sundered that he’d managed to construct with great difficulty out of the fragments of the Immolation Hawk that had preceded it.

“After all I’ve done for you,” he said, “you might be a little more grateful.”

“Go fuck yourself, Nirai-zho,” General Kel Cheris said, and this time she sounded very nearly cheerful.

 

* * *

 

Commander Shuos Jedao couldn’t be entirely certain what exactly he’d done to attract Shuos Hexarch Istradez’s attention, but it was probably the incident with the lubricant, since he’d barely returned to his home swarm and changed back into his uniform when the new orders came. And he’d only had a few seconds to open them up and stare slack-jawed like an idiot before the grid chimed at him and he was leaning to one side, hand on the gun at his belt. Hells, he hated being stuck on stations. “Come in,” he drawled, trying to calm his heartbeat and, hopefully, his trigger instinct.

The door slid open, and Shuos Instructor Zehun stood there, silhouetted very carelessly against the light, wrapped up in something big, russet-colored and fluffy, looking for all the world like someone’s lost grandparent. It would be a more convincing picture if Jedao didn’t know exactly who he was looking at. He was slightly gratified to note how still they held themselves until Jedao relaxed slightly, moved his hand from his gun, and bent in a sitting bow.

“Settle down, Commander,” Zehun said, and took their own advice, settling into the one chair besides Jedao’s that the small office provided. “I brought you a present.”

“Is it an explanation of these orders?” Jedao asked, and then, remembering himself, “Sir.”

“It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?” Zehun asked, mildly, and Jedao suddenly remembered in extreme clarity that he had cheated on Zehun’s courses not once but twice during his time at Shuos Academy. He’d assumed at the time that the instructor had been tolerant, even encouraging, of… unorthodox solutions, but now he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was finally going to get his just desserts for his behavior ten years previously.

“It’s been quite a while, yes,” he managed.

“And yet I remember you clearly,” Zehun said, with a tiny smile. “You were a… memorable student. I recall you were rather fond of jeng-zai?”

He had been, and still was. He couldn’t remember Instructor Zehun ever expressing an interest, though. Jedao still couldn’t see where this was going but now he was certain he was in for it. Whatever ‘it’ turned out to be. “This station is a long way from the Citadel of Eyes. I didn’t know you went out in the field, Instructor.”

Zehun ignored him, just reached into a pocket inside their coat- making Jedao twitch slightly- and brought out a black, rectangular wooden case (probably not real wood) which turned out to contain a deck of cards. The cards were also black, on the side Jedao could see, with what looked like a beautifully intricate pattern of gold lines that glimmered as Zehun shuffled the deck.

Jedao watched as four cards were played face up on his desk. Zehun didn’t have the panache of a street diviner, but it was still a dramatic moment.

 

_The Fortress, reversed._

_Master of Doors._

_The Hexarch._

_Death._

 

Jedao opened his mouth to ask if it was meant to be a Kel or Shuos spread, looked at Zehun’s cheerfully ugly face, and closed his mouth again. Of course it would be both.

 _This is the explanation for my orders,_ Jedao reminded himself, and stared at the cards. The Master of Doors was a tempting place to start- it looked like a very obvious warning. But that didn’t work for either kind of spread. Start with the Hexarch instead, that one was a freebie. The realm had six Hexarchs, but Zehun would only ever be referring to one of them. That covered the lie lurking beneath, big surprise. The Fortress was also easy- it had to mean the Nexus Fortress that Jedao wasn’t supposed to know had recently fallen to heresy. Presumably the final destination after his mysterious orders had been followed. And it was covering a past influence- he blinked, and looked at the Master of Doors again.

“You’ve got to be shitting me,” he said.

His old instructor made a small tsk-ing sound in the back of their throat. “That was slow, Jedao.”

Covering, Jedao thought, or would be covering. Huh. “The resurrection of undead generals isn’t where most people’s minds automatically go,” he said. “No matter how famous the general’s emblem.” He was talking on automatic, mind suddenly full of the _implications_.

“You’re not most people,” Zehun chided, a warning note in their voice. “You’ll need to do better, if you want to survive.”

Jedao wanted to say, _You’re not my teacher any more._ He bit his tongue.

Zehun put the rest of the cards down on the desk, and the box, too. It really did look like real wood. Then they leaned back in their chair, looking genuinely tired.

“You need to figure out who your enemy is,” they said.

“I don’t think you’re my enemy, sir,” Jedao told them. _You only work for her._

Zehun narrowed their eyes at him, and Jedao had to remind himself that they weren’t psychic, or he would have been dead a long time ago.

“Listen carefully, because I’m only going to say this once,” Zehun said, quietly and clearly. “Whatever you may think, this is not an attempt to get rid of you. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t extremely real and present danger. Getting the fortress back is paramount. But your hexarch would like you to bring yourself back, as well.” They paused, and then said, “So would I.”

Jedao thought about that. “I appreciate the sentiment, sir,” he said eventually. “But I’m not the Shuos’s responsibility anymore.”

“In our hexarch’s eyes, you’ll always be our responsibility,” Zehun replied. “The card set is a gift. It was quite expensive. I think the gold paint is real.”

Jedao looked at the cards again. He reached out with one finger and moved the fourth card. Underneath was the proverbial hidden fifth. The Drowned General, waving hair picked out in lines of gold and black.

He looked up sharply, but the world was fading into fuzzy unconsciousness.

 

* * *

 

  
Jedao woke up not knowing where he was and reaching for his gun. It wasn't there, which sent a spike of panic straight through his brain. He was in a strange six-sided room, and the walls were mirrors, reflecting motion as he flung himself upwards. He was cold.  
  
His gun wasn't at his hip because he wasn't wearing his uniform, just a heated robe that didn't feel like much protection against the vulnerability of the situation. His augment helpfully told him that he was on a different station, but declined to give him any more information. He couldn't remember anything after Zehun leaving his office.  
  
_Shit,_ he thought, and then froze half-upright, because the voice in his head wasn't his. _What the fuck is this?_ he said inside his head, more deliberately. Yes, it was a woman's voice, hoarsened by age, accent like a propaganda broadcast, but a historical one, kind of out of date.    
  
“Where's my gun?” he asked, aloud. “I'm going to be pissed if I don't get it back. Cost me six months' wages.” It was a relief to hear his own voice, with its familiar drawl.  
  
“It's with your uniform,” the female voice said. “You'll get it back soon enough. I know this must be a stressful situation for you. I apologize.”  
  
There was someone in his head. Jedao didn't hyperventilate, but it took every ounce of self control he could call on. Instead he tried to massage some feeling back into his leg muscles. When he looked down, though, he saw his shadow. _Well, that's new._  
  
“I can't read your mind,” the voice said after a while. “You'll have to speak, or use subvocals, if you want to communicate with me.”  
  
Relief hit like a wave, and Jedao had to fight not to show that either. “I assume I'm speaking to General Kel Cheris?” Jedao asked, still looking at the shadow. It looked sort of like a woman in uniform, but the edges of the shape burned like gold fire, flaking off in little pieces that gave the impression of feathers before they disintegrated into ash.  
  
“Correct,” the voice said.  
  
Jedao saluted sharply. Finally- and far too late- he examined his surroundings properly. His brain felt slow and sticky. Taking a step across the smooth gray floor confirmed that the walls were mirrors, but what was reflected in it was not his body. He took another step towards the closest wall, and stared. General Cheris was shorter than she looked in the propaganda vids. When he tried to look her visage in the eye, the reflection looked down at Jedao's chest, which was annoying. She was a striking woman, made distinguished by the clear marks of age she had chosen to show; doubtless that was why she was put in so many vids. She was built like an infantry soldier, Jedao noted, not like a high general who spent her life in space, which was what she had been at the time of her death.  
  
“Sir,” he said, “may I ask some questions?”  
  
“Please do, soldier,” Cheris said, “I'd be concerned if you didn't.” Her reflection didn't open its mouth as she talked. That was- unsettling. He decided to look at the shadow instead, despite the fact that it sort of hurt his eyes.  
  
“The mechanics of your- deployment- are kept secret. Do they require- attachment to a living host? In this case, myself?”  
  
“The Nirai call it anchoring,” Cheris said. “They call me a revenant. I have no substance, but exotic effects can reach me through the shadow. They'll hit me before they hit you, so you can use me as a shield, if you like. I could explain the math-”  
  
“Please don't,” Jedao interjected. She was using an academy-instructor tone. He wondered if that was an intentional shield, or if she was simply tired of rattling off the same facts to different hapless victims.  
  
“I can't read your thoughts, but I can speak to you. However, the only ones who can hear me are you and other revenants.”  
  
“There are others?” Jedao asked.  
  
“There's one,” Cheris said. “You'll meet him.” Her instructor-tone didn't exactly change, but there was something there. Jedao noted it.

Having a ghost general stuck to him wasn’t something Jedao had ever thought to plan for. He tried to organize his thoughts. This was going to put a slight crimp in his style, but as long as she couldn’t read his thoughts it wasn’t a huge problem.

The huge problem- potentially- was whatever operation had been performed to attach her to him, and the missing gap in his memory.

On the other hand, he realized, this could be seen as an amazing opportunity, because-

Two of the walls peeled apart, revealing a long rectangular room with a treadmill, and a man standing next to the treadmill, looking at Jedao. Jedao stepped into the room, because clearly that was what he was supposed to do. The man was significantly taller than Jedao, and at a closer range it became apparent that the look in his smoky golden eyes was frank interest. He was dressed in a generic Nirai uniform that was missing any rank insignia. He held out a pile of folded black fabric that Jedao recognized as his own uniform.

There was clearly nowhere private to change. Jedao didn’t like the idea of stripping down in front of this stranger, but he refused to hesitate in removing his robe and taking the uniform from the Nirai. The golden eyes watched him, and there was a hint of a smile on the man’s sculpted face. Inside Jedao’s head, Cheris sighed. “Don’t let him get under your skin, soldier,” she advised.

“You’re no fun,” the Nirai said. His voice was beautiful, too. “You’re never any fun.”

“You can hear her?” Jedao asked. He looked at the Nirai’s shadow. It was a mass of fluttering moth-shapes, and it made him sick to look at.

“ _You’re_ taking all of this unusually well,” the Nirai said.

“I’m adaptable,” Jedao said in response, fastening his jacket. “I assume that’s why I was chosen for this assignment.”

“Well, you’re certainly Shuos.”

And that was probably the real reason why he’d been chosen, Jedao reflected. Just like all the hopeless commands he’d been given in the past. He was expendable, the Kel who would never really be a Kel.

To his surprise, it was the general who came to his defense. “He’s strong,” she said, levelly. “Like any good Kel.”

“I’m sure,” the Nirai said, and now he was smiling. It was a lovely smile, and Jedao didn’t trust it at all. “Walk on the treadmill, please.”

Jedao tried it, and tripped over his own feet. He managed to catch himself before falling off the treadmill, and found himself looking directly at the Nirai’s smile as he struggled to get his feet moving again. Jedao smiled blandly back.

He climbed on the treadmill again. Yes: his coordination was definitely shot. He kept feeling like his feet ought to be closer. This was unpleasant, but it wasn’t like he’d never operated with his reflexes fucked for one reason or another. “Please tell me this problem resolves itself with practice,” he said.

The Nirai shrugged. “It probably will,” he said nonchalantly. “The effect is called bleedthrough. You might get some transference of emotions too. With you this isn’t as big of an issue because you’re not a Kel. You don’t have formation instinct.”

He produced a gun from somewhere. It wasn’t any kind of gun Jedao had ever seen before, which was kind of exciting. “The other thing we don’t tell people is that the Black Cradle does not exactly have a… stabilizing effect. You may need to shoot the general.”

Jedao hopped off the treadmill.His feet weren’t any less clumsy but he was beginning to get a better feel for the clumsiness itself, and hopefully starting to understand how to accommodate for it. “You’re asking me to shoot _General Kel Cheris?_ ” he asked, incredulously.

“If you were Kel, I wouldn’t even bother,” the Nirai said. “But you’re Shuos, so we’re letting her out with you for longer than usual. She may begin to behave erratically. Shoot the shadow, and she’ll be extracted and prepared for her next deployment.”

“How am I supposed to tell when she’s being… erratic?” Jedao wondered.

“It’ll be obvious. Last time she started singing and wouldn’t stop for hours. Now take the gun, already.”

Jedao took the gun, and the holster that was offered with it, promising himself he’d take a good look at the weapon later.

“Don’t get ideas,” the Nirai advised. “You’re expected to accurately relay the General’s orders, nothing more.” His eyes, amber-gold and heartbreakingly beautiful, rested on Jedao like the man was assigning him a numerical value. “From your record, you’re either quite a good tactician or phenomenally lucky. But the General has four centuries of experience on you, and she’s the one the Kel want to be following.”

 _Well you’re certainly not just some technician,_ Jedao thought, almost too intrigued to be thrown by the foreign narrator in his head any more. The most interesting thing was that he couldn’t tell if he was being bated or not.

“Belay _that_ _,_ ” Cheris said sharply. “You’ve got a mind and a skill and we’re going to make use of both.”

The Nirai smiled, and Jedao thought, _maybe it wasn’t me who was being bated_. “Well, it’s not my problem,” he said. “I’m just giving free advice to our young friend here. Start obviously arguing with her, and the Kel are going to get twitchy.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Jedao said.

“You might as well get to work, then. I’ve prepared more comfortable surroundings. Six circuits and kick down the door. I was going to replace the door with something more interesting, but my attention wandered.” A door opened right next to him. He winked at Jedao, then walked out of it.

“Well, I think I can guess why the Hexarchs haven’t been hopping into the Black Cradle themselves, if it would require being roommates with him,” Jedao commented. “How do you stand it? I’d go crazy.”

“You get used to it after a while,” Cheris said wryly, instead of ordering him to be more professional. The hope buried deep in Jedao’s heart grew a little. She might be a ghost, but she was still a person.

He could work with that.

“Let’s get to work,” Cheris said, “no time like the present,” and Jedao agreed, so he walked out of the treadmill room, his burning, feathered shadow following like a train of ashes.

* * *

 

 

“What do you know of the situation?” Jedao asked. “Sir.”

“Nothing,” was the answer. “Get me up to speed.”

“Calendrical rot.” But she’d probably guessed that much already. Calendrical warfare had been her particular genius, and the reason Kel Command had immortalized her through voluntary execution and resurrection. Though Jedao had always wondered about the voluntary part. The Kel did love their volunteers. He pulled up displays with all the information the grid had on the situation at the Fortress.

The decorations in each room were subtly unsettling, and thinking about them caused a knot of disturbance in Jedao’s stomach, so instead he focused on the displays and on Cheris’s calm, laconic observations. She asked him to pull up a three-dimensional display of the rot around the Fortress of Scattered Needles, and then another display with the data on this specific regime of rot, and went quiet for some time, presumably looking at them with her famed mathematician’s eyes. Jedao himself looked through information on the Fortress’s population and the origins of the heresy, trying to think the way the heretics did and at the same time trying hard not to think about how many people he and Cheris were going to kill.

“Anything interesting?” Jedao asked Cheris, looking at the displays of incomprehensible numbers and equations that seemed to move under his eyes.

“Nothing immediately relevant,” was her frustratingly noncommittal response. “I wish we had better information. I can guess at what their calendar has done to the terrain, but without knowing for sure I can’t usefully factor it into our swarm composition. How many cindermoths do we have available?” Jedao pulled up the information. “Only two,” she said, disappointment creeping into her tone. “Well, we should be able to wear down the ice in about twenty-nine years.”

“You worked that out in your head?” Jedao asked, astonished both at the display of mathematical skill and at what this implied about her knowledge of cindermoths, which were new enough that Jedao himself had never been aboard one. He’d been under the impression that she was only taken out of the freezer every few decades, when the Hexarchate needed to win a difficult campaign or intimidate an enemy. Either that was a lie, or she’d updated herself very quickly before he’d woken up. He found a simulator in the grid and painstakingly inputted the numbers himself; it produced the same result.

He’d never before had an opportunity like this, to work with someone as gifted with numbers as he was hopeless at them. For the first time he felt a stirring of excitement despite his dread of the coming carnage.

“We need to go in with a plan to deal with the ice,” Cheris said, “or we’re fucked.” The vulgarity was strangely shocking to hear in her voice, the voice of Kel propaganda. The words were coming from different places around the room, as though she’d started pacing.

Jedao made a decision quickly. “I have an idea about the ice, sir.”

Silence, and then, closer than he’d expected, “Let’s hear it, then.”

“First I’d like to ask something,” Jedao said. “What happens after we get past the ice? We go in shooting?”

“Not exactly,” Cheris said. “Guns change minds, not hearts. And calendrical rot is a matter of hearts.”

Jedao thought about her words a great deal over the next few weeks.

  


 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> see end notes for content warning.

Jedao was hesitant at first when putting together the swarm. He kept waiting for Cheris to make the decisions, and only when she remained silent did he make his own choice, at which point she chimed in to agree, disagree, or express reservations. She readily agreed with his choice of infantry commander: Colonel Kel Ragath, whose highly decorated service record had to appeal to Cheris’s traditional sensibilities and whose career as a historian intrigued Jedao. It had occurred to Jedao that this mission would be an opportunity to get to know a few high officers earlier than he’d planned, and if Jedao was anything he was a person who took advantage of opportunities.

When Jedao tried to review available Shuos personnel, the system would only give him the names of intelligence teams and infiltrator companies, without any attached personnel information. “Not unusual,” Cheris said.

“You don’t have to tell me, sir,” Jedao muttered. “Damn fox bureaucracy.”

“The hexarchs want us to win,” Cheris pointed out, neutrally. “Shuos as much as any of them. They have incentive to assign us competent operatives on their own initiative.”

“I know, I know,” Jedao said, pushing his bangs out of his eyes to scrub at his eyesockets with his gloved knuckles. He finished submitting the swarm order. “We should go over what we’re going to say to them when they get here.”

“There’ll be time for that in the morning, Commander,” Cheris said. She’d told him he wouldn’t be brevetted until the swarm was assembled. “You need to sleep.”

Stars help him, she sounded like his mother. “Is there somewhere to sleep here? That isn’t decorated with morbidly themed biological arrangements?”

“Go out the way we came, and I think you’ll find it’s been set up for you.”

Backtracking through the corridor did reveal the room of mirrors, now furnished with a surprisingly luxurious-looking bed. There was a table, which held a pile of Jedao’s possessions from Muru 5: his uniforms and civilian clothes, his weapons- there was the Patterner, oh ridiculous surge of relief!- one or two earrings, the jeng-zai set from Nidana in its cheerfully colorful box, and, ah, the little wooden box containing Zehun’s set. He riffled through the cards quickly to check that they were all there before carelessly shoving the box under a pile of shirts. His calendrical sword was there too. “Wonder if I could get you with this, sir,” he mused idly, rolling the hilt a little on the table with the pads of his fingers.

“Read the orientation packet, idiot,” the general responded, sounding genuinely amused.

His Kel standard-issue sleepwear was there too, smelling oddly of unplaceable spices. Nirai potpourri, maybe. Jedao sat on the bed to change. He glanced once at his reflection, and found Cheris’s image looking away. He wasn’t sure whether it was more or less disturbing to have it act independently of him. He folded his uniform neatly, and then threw himself sprawling onto the bed. It was the best bed he’d slept on in- well, ever. A stray edge of a memory caught him- _jumping on the bed in the most opulent VIP guest room at Shuos Academy, Ruo’s curls flying upward with each bounce_ \- and he was unable to stop himself from full-body flinching away from it. He tried to disguise the action by running a hand over the bedcover. Black velvet embroidered with a galaxy of silver silk stars.

“Is all this on my behalf, or yours?” he asked aloud.

Instead of answering, Cheris said, “Are we going to talk about the invariant ice?”

She’d waited until he was more vulnerable. Crafty. Jedao rolled onto his other side. The scars on his chest ached gently. “I told you, we’ll get it down by attacking the mind of the operator,” he said.

“I’d be a poor general if I didn’t ask for more information than that.”

And that was something no one would accuse her of being. “The shields have a human operator,” Jedao said subvocally, letting the words die in his throat despite the apparent emptiness of the room. “We scare the operator, they’ll slip up, leave a hole for us to tear through. I used tactics like that all the time at Shuos Academy.”

“Yes,” Cheris said, painfully patient, “but this isn’t a fox game, Commander.”

“Isn’t it?” Jedao asked lazily. He slipped the new jeng-zai deck from where he’d hidden it up one sleeve and shuffled a little, eyes unfocused. Without looking, he drew the deuce of gears.

“I know there’s more to it than you’re saying,” the undead general said. “But I suppose I have the whole trip to the Fortress to figure out the answer, or come up with my own solution to the shields.”

Foxes and hounds, was she actually agreeing to play a game with him?

“Get some sleep,” she told him again. “I’ll wake you if anything unexpected happens.”

“You don’t sleep?” Jedao asked.

“Not in four hundred years,” she said, and Jedao felt ice run down his spine, momentarily banishing exhaustion with pure adrenaline. She’d been awake all that time? Where had she _been?_

“Sleep,” she repeated, and the lights in the room dimmed, the mirror maze replaced by the comfortingly faint glow of distant galaxies.

Jedao let the cards fall to the floor, refusing to care when the Wheel of Worlds fell face-up reversed in the sea of black. He rolled onto his back, stared at one particular star, and counted his breaths. She couldn’t read his mind, he reminded himself, over and over, watching the burning shadow at the edge of his vision, until he finally fell asleep.

He woke up to a stomach growling with hunger, but the grid was telling him that today was a remembrance. The Day of Serpent Fire, which was a relatively new one, being installed when Jedao himself was about five years old. As he lit the green candle in the shape of a snake slit open that someone had delivered while he slept, it occurred to him that Cheris might not even know of the remembrance day’s existence, if her last excursion out into the galaxy had been more than a few decades ago. “Do you know this one?” he asked, hands perfectly steady as he placed the candle back on the table.

“No,” Cheris said, and her voice was colorless as dead leaves, or torn out pages of an old book.

“They called themselves the Serpentines,” Jedao said, “hence the candle shape. They believed reincarnation. Heretical, of course.” His own voice was as steady as his hands, wasn’t it?

“Of course,” Cheris said.

She didn’t say anything about observing the remembrance herself. Jedao had to assume a ghost’s observances didn’t have any effect on consensus mechanics; otherwise, surely she would have remained observant. After all, she was responsible for the creation of at least ten remembrances herself, three of which were still observed under the modern high calendar. The original heretics who Cheris had crushed in combat were long gone, but someone was still tortured in their memory once a year. He wondered how often she thought about that.

After the required thirty-nine minutes of meditation, Jedao did his morning exercises. His routine had evolved over the years, with some of the forms he'd been taught in Shuos assassin training being replaced by ones more suited to life as Kel infantry, and then he'd dropped most of them altogether after being repurposed as a moth officer. These days he mostly exercised to keep in shape for dueling, but it occurred to him now that upper body strength was never a _dis_ advantage, and he spent an extra quarter of an hour doing one armed push-ups. The extra time was also added opportunity to assess the strange effect the ghost general seemed to be having on his body. He had a strange sense that his legs should be shorter, his center of balance lower. After the pushups he reached for the sword hilt. “I’d advise against that,” Cheris said.

Jedao paused, his hand hovering over the hilt. “Afraid I’ll slice my own arm off?”

“I’ve read your file,” Cheris said. “You’re a decent duelist.” Jedao thought that was a bit of an understatement, considering his win-loss record, but it would be bad form to correct a general. “I was only ever mediocre.”

“But-” Jedao said, caught in surprise, and then stopped himself.

“Yes,” Cheris said, and there was a dry desert of sarcasm behind her teacher-tone now. “In my time the Heptarchate had some extremely high quality propagandists. As a result, I’ve been immortalized as some kind of physics-breaking duelist master. It’s all fake.”

“Have you seen _War of Ravens_?” Jedao asked. “In the tenth episode, you manage to dismember two opponents with one stroke. While they were on opposite sides of a warmoth dinner hall. You should see it, the Andan got an extremely attractive actor to play you-”

Cheris actually groaned.

“So you’re saying some of this clumsiness is directly from you,” Jedao said, after a pause to enjoy the thrill of having provoked such a human reaction from her.

“No,” she said irritably. “But I am saying that even if you manage to synch with my reflexes, you’re probably still going to lose out.”

Jedao was surprised at how much his stomach tightened at that. It was stupid. In his current situation, his mind was the important weapon, not the reflexes that had only gotten him in trouble half the time anyway. It still stung to lose an advantage he hadn’t realized he’d been taking for granted.

“You should get to the briefing room,” Cheris said. “And you should think about what you’re going to say to your swarm once they’re assembled.”

His stomach knotted for an entirely different reason. He’d forgotten about that. He’d addressed a ship’s crew before, but never an entire swarm, a swarm that he was responsible for. They would resent him for jumping rank, and for being a Shuos, and maybe even for having access to their beloved general.

He’d have to pretend that none of it bothered him.

“Why do I give the speech?” he asked, as he walked back through the door, out of the mirror room and through the black corridors. “Aren’t you the one actually leading this mission?”

“You need to win their respect,” Cheris said. “If things go very wrong, you might have to finish the campaign on your own.” _If I have to shoot you, you mean,_ Jedao thought in her voice, remembering what the Nirai had said with a chill. She seemed perfectly sane, but then again, he knew as well as anyone how misleading seeming could be.

 

* * *

 

The swarm assembled piecemeal, each moth taking up a lattice position as assigned by the research station’s command center. Jedao and Cheris viewed the feed from display six. Jedao couldn’t help but admire the lean sleekness of the triangle-shaped moths, the deadly beauty of the enormous cindermoths.

One hour and seventy-three minutes behind schedule, the swarm finished assembling. Jedao notified them that he would address them in twenty-eight minutes. “I want to see individual commanders,” he specified.

“Good decision,” Cheris said. Jedao wanted to be irritated, to find her patronizing, but in the end he was only a little less susceptible to praise from a superior than a true formation-instinct-dazzled ashhawk.

The displays arranged themselves according to rank and, when the time came, lit up simultaneously. Two cindermoth commanders, thirteen bannermoth commanders, an infantry colonel, an intelligence captain, and seven boxmoth commanders crowded up the screen, but Jedao had played a lot of video games in his youth and he was good at tracking a lot of things at once. Except that this wasn’t a video game interface; this was his new command.

For a moment Jedao couldn’t remember his own name, much less what he’d planned to say. He took a slow breath, and everything came back into focus.

They were saluting him. Not him, he reminded himself; the general’s wings on his uniform. “At ease,” he said. He could hear his drawl more strongly than usual, because he’d been paying so much attention to Cheris’s accent. He could reduce the drawl, but he hadn’t yet decided if that was a good idea. “You’ve noticed the eye. Brevet General Shuos Jedao for the duration of this campaign by order of Kel Command. I am being advised by General Kel Cheris.” He couldn’t see the shadow behind him, but he could tell they were watching it. Their eyes had all widened, and there was an awestruck yearning on all of them.

“Our mission is to retake the Fortress of Scattered Needles from the heretics,” Jedao went on.

“I knew it!” The speaker was Kel Nerevor, commander of the cindermoth Unspoken Law, a lean, middling-dark woman with white streaks in her hair and a laughing mouth. “Everyone’s been talking about it. It will be a great honor to retake the Fortress for the Raven General.”

“Don’t interrupt me, Commander,” Jedao said lazily, and smiled when he saw the chagrin on all their faces mixed with suspicion: they were trying to figure out if the reprimand had come from him or from Cheris.

Nerevor was hardly abashed; Jedao decided he’d have to keep an eye on her. She ducked her head in acknowledgement, but her eyes remained bright. Jedao half expected Cheris to comment, but he didn’t wait to hear from her.

“I’m sure you suicide hawks will be happy to hear we’ll be going straight in,” Jedao said. “I’ll transmit the intelligence we have, but it’s scant.”

“Subdisplay 17,” Cheris said, but Jedao had already been watching the rectangle showing the head of Captain-analyst Shuos Ko. Ko had a beard, which made him stand out among the clean-shaven Kel. The beard looked nice on Ko; too bad the rest of him was so studiously bland.

“General,” Ko said, inclining his head. He had the pleasant, personalityless voice of the carefully trained hound. “We have some additional information that we can provide at your discretion. I think you’ll be interested in some of the traffic analysis that came out of the Fortress in the two days before it ceased communications with the hexarchate. It confirms that the rot was carefully orchestrated.”

“Appreciated,” Jedao said.

Nerevor jumped in again. “What moth will you be bannering?” she asked. Her eyes gleamed.

“Hers,” Cheris said immediately, and Jedao had to bite back an annoyed, _Obviously_. He had to make allowances for the fact that she was probably used to working with tradition-bound Kel who would have picked Paizan’s moth for reasons of seniority.

“I’ll be bannering the Unspoken Law,” Jedao said. He went on before Nerevor could speak again. “We’ll be using the null emblem.”

He watched Nerevor’s face.The commander’s eyes went wide, her face pale.

“Not the Master of Ravens?” she said after a moment, tone calmly enquiring but with a sharp tension in it. On the other subdisplays, the other commanders were trying to control their own expressions, some with more success than others. Ko was looking alert. _Probably Instructor Zehun is at this very moment filling out the paperwork for my assassination,_ Jedao thought.

Null emblem. A featureless black banner. It was used only by generals in disgrace. Even newly promoted generals were permitted to use the default sword-and-feather emblem until they had a chance to register something. The idea of using it for a swarm led by the Hexarchate’s most celebrated military hero was deeply offensive. But Cheris herself, the one with the most right to find offense, hadn’t spoken.

Not that the other officers could hear her if she did.

“Sir,” Nerevor said, sounding scandalized. Jedao wondered if she knew where she was going with that, if she really intended to challenge a superior’s orders. He wasn’t going to give her the opportunity on this occasion.

“We don’t want to let the heretics know who to expect,” he explained. A very un-Kel tactic, but if they hadn’t wanted Shuos thinking, they shouldn’t have put their swarm in the half-gloved hands of a Shuos. He was bombing any chance he might of had of getting them to forget his faction of origin, but that had been a lost cause anyways.

“The Shuos team and I will board the Unspoken Law in two hours,” Jedao said. “Make the necessary arrangements.”

“Sir.”

Moments later, all the faces had blinked out and Jedao turned off the displays. He swiveled his chair around to face his shadow. It was holding still, at least the general shape was, though those burning edges were always drifting. Impossible not to get the impression that she was staring him down.

He’d always been good at staring contests.

“Are you expecting me to shout at you, soldier?” She sounded almost amused.

“I’m curious why you’re giving me so much free reign, sir,” he said.

“Curious?”

“All right, unsettled.” Things weren’t adding up, and Zehun had already told him he was in danger. “If you’re just going to be an advisor, and not a puppeteer, why wouldn’t Kel Command anchor you to a high general, instead of breveting a warmoth commander who’s only been fighting space battles for a few years?”

The shadow flickered, like a breeze had blown through it. “Perceptive question,” Cheris said. “But not necessarily a smart one.”

Damn it, that sounded bad. He almost wished he was back in Shuos Academy; there’d been just as much chance of being summarily executed by your overseers there, but at least they’d been expected to pry into secrets.

For a dark moment, he almost wished for formation instinct. A true Kel in his position would have been able to simply give up thought and fear and give themselves over to the universe-grounding knowledge that they were their general’s gun. But from all the evidence, Cheris wanted him to think and act independently.

“Let me make you an offer,” Cheris said. “When I was alive, I wanted to be an instructor. While I was alive, my superiors felt I was more useful on the field. Now that I’m dead, I can do both. I can advise you- on war, and on your soldiers. Make use of me, and we will win this, together. I promise you that.”

Jedao crossed his legs and propped his elbow on the table. “And if we disagree?”

“I’m sure those will be teachable moments,” Cheris said, so dryly that Jedao almost surprised himself by laughing.

“All right,” Jedao said. “You’ve got yourself a deal, sir.”

“In that case,” Cheris said, “get back to work. What was your assessment of that briefing?” Jedao was about to begin, when she interrupted. “Wait.” A second later one of the doors to the room irised open. How had she known-?

It was the Nirai. He was wearing a tightly tailored vest embellished with a galaxy of seed pearls, and large jeweled moths adorned each earlobe. “You’re going out of my care,” he said to Jedao. “I wanted to say goodbye, and wish you luck.” His beautiful eyes were warm and smiling as he rested them on Jedao’s face. Jedao felt himself flush.

“That’s kind of you, sir,” he said, wishing he knew the man’s rank and whether Jedao ought to be bowing.

The Nirai took a step closer. He moved with a dancer’s grace, placing his feet lightly on the star-strewn carpet. When had he moved his arm? His fingertips were resting lightly on Jedao’s shoulder. “You’re in a rough situation,” he murmured. “I could show you some sympathy, if you’re looking for it.”

“We’re on a schedule,” Cheris’s disembodied voice said harshly, from close at Jedao’s left. Jedao blinked. His throat was dry; he swallowed.

“The Shuos will be expecting us,” he agreed.

The other man leaned further. “Make them wait,” he whispered into Jedao’s ear.

“Jedao,” Cheris said. She sounded bizarrely angry, a jarring change from her earlier instructor calm. “Don’t.”

For a moment Jedao felt a flash of anger in return. There was nothing wrong with him sleeping with a Nirai, no regulation or taboo forbidding it, and he was about to go on a dangerous mission where there would only be Kel for company for who knew how many months, and might very well be killed by his own superiors even if he survived the campaign. What did she have against him taking a moment of companionship where he could get it? Not to mention, it wasn’t every day he got an offer from someone as attractive and good at seduction as this Nirai.

Logic reasserted itself slowly, fighting against the feel of the Nirai’s breath along his jaw. This was the first time Cheris had asked him for anything, and they had just pledged partnership. It was beyond stupid to jeopardize that just because he was feeling lonely.

Jedao took a step backwards, disentangling himself from the Nirai’s light touch. “Sorry,” he said, and forced himself to grin carelessly. “Duty calls.”

“A shame,” the Nirai said, and gave Jedao a smile in return, heartbreakingly sweet; Jedao wrenched his eyes away to watch instead the flutter of moths in the man’s shadow and experience a sudden nauseating drop in the pit of his stomach. Maybe the shadow was just a fashionable Nirai trick.

Maybe. Or maybe he’d nearly been a truly enormous idiot and-

“Have fun fighting heretics,” the Nirai said to Jedao’s shadow. “Then hurry back.”

“I’m your gun,” Cheris said, with the same inflection as though she’d said “Fuck you,” and that was it, Jedao knew, there was the piece he needed to put- something- together, but there was no time to puzzle over it now when the Shuos were expecting them.

Four servitors entered to take his belongings. He was used to servitors now, and didn’t think much about the fact that they hadn’t been called.

A message popped up on his augment. The Shuos team was ready for transfer.

He bowed deeply at the Nirai, just in case. The man smiled and returned the bow, much more gracefully. “I’ll see you again, Shuos Jedao,” he said, smooth and sweet as honey.

Jedao wondered if that was a threat or a promise. Perhaps it was both.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning: Kujen attempts to seduce Jedao through an anchor in this chapter, but it doesn't go anywhere.


End file.
